Groupe Mutuel brought Solutions CTC into its team a year ago. One recommendation became a six-month project, and delivery is now about four times faster. This is what changed, and why the way Groupe Mutuel works made it possible.
Key Takeaways
- CTC works inside Groupe Mutuel’s own team, as a partner rather than an outside delivery shop.
- A single CTC recommendation became a budgeted six-month project. Delivery is now about four times faster than when the engagement began.
- The gains show up in three places: how fast new work reaches the market, the editing experience for the people who build pages, and the quality of the pages themselves.
- The biggest factor was not technical. It was a team that measures value, trusts its partners, and has a product owner who can say no.
At a glance
- Client: Groupe Mutuel
- Industry: Health and life insurance
- Headquarters: Martigny, Switzerland
- Engagement: Embedded in the client’s team, ongoing
- Duration: One year, now heading into year two
- Platform: Magnolia DXP
- Outcome: Delivery about four times faster
The client
Groupe Mutuel is a Swiss health and life insurance group serving private customers and businesses. Its digital platform is how many of those customers find information, compare cover and get things done, so the speed and quality of what reaches the site matters directly to the business.
How the engagement works
CTC doesn’t run this engagement from the outside. Our consultants work inside Groupe Mutuel’s team, on the same backlog, in the same ceremonies, answering to the same product owner. The work covers development and support on Groupe Mutuel’s Magnolia DXP platform, but the part that makes the biggest difference is advice.
From the start, the relationship was set up as a partnership rather than an execution contract. Groupe Mutuel doesn’t just hand CTC tickets. It asks what we think, and it takes the answer seriously.
One recommendation, six months, four times faster
Early in the engagement, CTC found technical debt that had built up in the implementation over the years. Every platform that has been worked on long enough gathers some: shortcuts taken under deadline, workarounds that outlived the problem they solved, code that does the same job in three different ways. None of it is visible to customers, but all of it slows the team down, because every new piece of work has to get past it first.
CTC recommended a dedicated project to clean it up. It wasn’t a small ask. Doing it properly meant around six months of work that, from the outside, adds no new features.
Groupe Mutuel weighed it, budgeted it and committed to it. Once the work was done, delivery got roughly four times faster. That speed shows up in three ways:
- Speed to market. New content and features reach customers sooner, because there is less friction between deciding to do something and seeing it live.
- The editor experience. The people who build and maintain pages have a better interface to work in, so they spend their time on the content rather than working around the tool.
- Page quality. Faster delivery didn’t come at the cost of quality. The pages that ship are better built and more consistent than before.
A lot of good recommendations die in a slide deck. This one didn’t, and that had as much to do with Groupe Mutuel as with CTC.
What makes this team work
After a year inside the team, a few things stand out. None of them are technical, and all of them are the reason the technical work has gone well.
- They measure the right things. Groupe Mutuel’s KPIs are about value delivered, not volume. Nobody is rewarded for closing tickets that didn’t need to exist.
- The product owner can say no. Jérôme understands what value means for the business and protects the backlog accordingly. A backlog where everything gets a yes stops meaning anything.
- People trust each other. There is no blame and no talking behind backs. When something goes wrong, the conversation is about fixing it.
- Nobody protects territory. When someone is on vacation or off sick, others step in without being asked. The work keeps moving because the team sees it as shared.
- They practice agile instead of performing it. The ceremonies exist to make decisions, not to tick a box. The schedule is flexible because the trust is real.
Why year two matters
Most vendor relationships on enterprise platforms follow the same arc. A project starts, the work ships, and around the one-year mark the vendor rolls off and the client starts over with someone new, taking the context with them.
This one is going the other way. The first year built the trust and the working rhythm. The second year is where that pays off, because the team spends less time explaining and more time improving.
That’s the kind of partnership CTC is built for: working inside the client’s team, giving advice with nothing attached to it, and leaving the team more capable each year rather than more dependent.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean for CTC to be embedded in a client’s team?
Our consultants work as part of the client’s own team, on the same backlog and under the same product owner, rather than delivering work from the outside on a fixed scope. It means advice comes from people who know the platform and the business day to day.
How did Groupe Mutuel get delivery four times faster?
By acting on a CTC recommendation to clean up technical debt in the implementation, and funding a dedicated project of about six months to do it. The improvement came from removing what was slowing every piece of work down, not from asking people to work harder.
How long does it take to see results from an embedded partnership?
In this case, the main gains came within the first year. The first months go into understanding the platform and the team. The value grows from there, which is why the second year is usually more productive than the first.
Does CTC work with other insurance and healthcare organizations on Magnolia?
Yes. CTC has been building on Magnolia since 2008, and insurance, healthcare and financial services make up a large share of CTC’s work, including Quebec Blue Cross, Intact Insurance and BlueCross BlueShield of Alabama.